New Light on a Great Libertarian

“I’ve just ordered your book on Garet Garrett, brother to my grandmother, Gertrude Garrett Graham, and my great uncle. There are a few anecdotes from his later years of retirement in Tuckahoe NJ and his relationships with his family and I’d enjoy talking with you, once I’ve read your book.”

It was signed, “Trudy Beth Bond.”

Garet Garrett (1878–1954) author of The Driver, The People’s Pottage, and The American Story, was one of the great libertarian journalists of the 20th century. I wrote a book about him, Unsanctioned Voice, published in 2008.

The book is more about Garrett as a writer than as a person and necessarily so. Most of his papers were lost. He had no children. His third wife, Dorothy Williams Garrett, had a son from a previous marriage, and he also had died, but I found his daughter. She had a few photos of Garrett but was too young to have known him.

Digging for details more than half a century after he died, I found one person who had known him: Richard Cornuelle, who had worked with Garrett in the early 1950s (and who died on April 26, 2011). Cornuelle had gone on to become an official at the National Association of Manufacturers — and had written a book, Reclaiming the American Dream, championing the nonprofit sector as an alternative to the welfare state. In 2007 I flew to New York City to meet him at his Greenwich Village townhouse and hear of his time with Garrett. Cornuelle, then 80, was delighted that someone wanted to know about the man who had been his mentor.

My book was more about Garrett as a writer than as a person and necessarily so. Most of his papers were lost.

Cornuelle gave me some personal details about Garrett, some of them incomplete. He told me one of Garrett’s sisters lived in a farmhouse on Garrett’s property at Tuckahoe. But which sister? Why was she there? What role had Garrett played in her family? He didn’t know. My book wasn’t mostly about things like that, but more personal details would have improved it.

After the book came out, I wondered whether I would hear from some lost relative. Three years went by. Then came the email from his grandniece, Trudy, who lives in the very town, Port Townsend WA, in which Liberty was founded and published for more than 20 years — a town about two hours’ drive and a ferry ride from my house.

Trudy was born in 1941. Through her, I got to talk to her brother Marshall, born 1943, and her sister Connie, born 1945. They knew Garrett as kids, aged 9 to 13. They were also part of a family that would have some stories about him. They might fill in some of the blanks in my account.

I had known that Garrett and his third wife, Dorothy, lived somewhere along the Tuckahoe River in New Jersey. From Connie, I received a satellite photo of the property.

At the beginning of the book I had listed Garrett’s siblings from Census records: Gertrude, Mary, Sarah, Thomas, and “what looks like ‘Clarra.’” But I knew nothing about them. Now I had their full names — it was “Clara” — and the dates of their births. I noticed that all but two of Garrett’s siblings were born in different towns, most of them not far from Garrett’s birthplace at Pana, in central Illinois. Garrett’s father Silas was a tinker — an itinerant tinsmith — and his family moved around.

From my new acquaintances, I heard one story of the children’s youth. Garret’s father, Silas, was a Protestant. What denomination was never said, though his funeral was in a Methodist church. According to Marshall, Garet’s mother, Alice, was a devout Catholic.

“They had made a pact when they married that their children would be allowed to make up their own minds,” Marshall said. “But the priest prevailed on Alice, and she did certain things behind her husband’s back, such as putting them in catechism class.” The effort backfired, and Clara, Gertrude, and Marie embraced the new religion of the time, Christian Science.

Then came an email from the very town, Port Townsend WA, in which Liberty was founded and published for more than 20 years.

“The Christian Science thing was a big schism in the family,” said Trudy, who was raised in that faith but abandoned it. She heard the story through her grandmother, Gertrude, who was zealous enough to become a Christian Science practitioner. Garrett was not a follower of Christian Science, and Trudy says his religious sisters disapproved of his drinking, smoking, and being married three times. But Gertrude and Marie also respected his achievement. They called him “Brother,” as if it were his name.

I learned little about Clara, who had stayed in Illinois. Sarah, whom they called Sadie, married a veterinarian and lived in Missouri and Iowa.

“I met my Aunt Sadie when I was 10,” Trudy said. “She seemed to have escaped the whole religion thing.”

Garrett’s younger brother Thomas had been an artist, and Connie has a painting of his (“landscape on the front, female nude on the back”). Thomas died young, in 1917, of somedisease. He is buried in the same cemetery as Garet and Dorothy Garrett, in Tuckahoe, which suggests that his elder brother had taken care of him — and perhaps had removed his remains, because Garrett didn’t move from Egg Harbor, NJ, to Tuckahoe until the mid-1920s.

The sister living on Garrett’s property was Marie. Trudy recalled the story that Marie had been living in Chicago. She was a man’s secretary for many years, and had become his mistress. “Supposedly his wife was sickly and when she died, he said, he would marry Marie, but he did not.”

His religious sisters disapproved of his drinking, smoking, and being married three times. But they also respected his achievement.

Trudy’s sister Connie writes: “As mother told me, Marie fell in love with a successful lawyer in Chicago. He was married and his wife was in a mental institution, and he told Marie there was some law that prevented a spouse from divorcing a spouse who is in an institution. So Marie consented to stay with him (my impression was that he paid for her apartment), something she otherwise would never have done.” Connie recalls her mother's stories of visiting Aunt Marie in Chicago as a kid, with her sisters Jane and Ruth, and "Uncle Walter" stopping by with candy for them.

When the man’s wife died, he wouldn't marry Marie. Connie continues: “Humiliated, Marie went east to Garet’s, where she stayed on, and where Joe French, Garet’s tenant farmer, fell for her and asked her to marry him.”

French was not an educated or worldly man. His claim to fame was playing baseball in the minor leagues in San Francisco, Topeka, Sioux City, Dubuque, Peoria, and Beaumont in the years before World War I. Trudy recalls that his fingers had been broken from playing catcher.

As Connie recalls the story, Marie went to Garet and asked his advice, telling him, “Imagine. That man is no more than a tenant farmer and he wants to marry me!” To which Garet replied, “At least he wants to make an honest woman out of you.” Trudy says that Marie married French “under duress from Garrett, who didn’t want to support Marie for the rest of his life.”

In none of Garrett’s writings does he talk about taking care of his family, or the stress of an obligation to do so. Garrett left his family in Iowa in his mid-teens. Several of the characters in his fiction are without family, and none of his fiction or his vast amount of journalism focuses on family issues or champions family loyalty. He addresses other things. Yet he takes care of his sister when the gamble of her life fails. He nudges her into a marriage with a man who loves her, and he provides them both with a house.

It is what honorable people do, if they can, when there is no welfare state.

Trudy, Marshall, and Connie recall Garrett as the success, the urban sophisticate, of the family — and, of course, much older than they. As preteens and early teens, they moved with their parents from suburban Chicago to New York City in 1953. She believes they were the only relatives of her generation who lived close enough to visit Garrett, and the only ones today who remember him.

In none of Garrett’s writings does he talk about taking care of his family, or the stress of an obligation to do so.

From the summer of 1953 to Garrett’s death in late 1954, they visited Tuckahoe often, staying at Marie and Joe’s, in the farmhouse on Garrett’s property. This other building was not a farmhouse really. It was a three-story brick house, covered with ivy. It had a ship’s binnacle on the porch, and Connie remembers it as “the captain’s house.” The place was the subject of a feature story in the Atlantic City Press. (Trudy has the clipping.) Part of the Stille Homestead, the house had been built in 1795 “by slaves,” the newspaper said, using “bricks brought from England.” It had thick walls and five fireplaces, two of them in the basement, “where in the cold winter time the first families cooked, ate and kept warm.” Upstairs it had a “borning room” where mothers gave birth, and outside was a small graveyard.

One of the side buildings had been made into a glassblowing studio for Garrett’s wife, Dorothy. Connie has a small bottle that Dorothy created, with a dime in it.

Trudy turned 13 in 1954. Of the captain’s house she remembers “a wonderful attic where I spent many, many hours reading old Saturday Evening Posts” that Garrett had kept in bundles. His articles were mostly above her head, but she saw his name on them in the Post. “It wasn’t really until then that I knew what Uncle Garrett did.”

Garet and his wife lived several hundred yards from the old house in a new house he had built. “Garet and Dorothy's house was enchanting to me,” Connie recalls. “It had the biggest fireplace I had ever seen and I remember very well the bust of Nefertiti that you mention in your book, as well as the high bookshelves that flanked the fireplace.”

Trudy remembers Garrett’s room with the two-story ceiling and the big fireplace. “The room had a cozy feel to it, almost like you would feel in a log home. Garrett was the boss of that room. Really he was the boss of the whole place. Dorothy was pretty much in her cups all the time.”

I had mentioned Dorothy’s alcoholism in the book, and all three of Gertrude’s descendants remembered it. They remembered Garrett drinking, too, but not being drunk.

They also remembered the outbuilding Garrett called his “cave,” where he wrote. “He built that,” Marshall recalled. “He was proud of that. He had a little storage area underground where he kept his ink cool. He had these big bottles of Scripps ink. Four of them. He’d refill the well on his desk.”

I had quoted Richard Cornuelle in the book about how Garrett would research a topic, keeping everything in his head, “muttering and fuming quietly. Then, suddenly, he would seize an old-fashioned pen holder, jam a new point into it, and scrawl on white foolscap, often for hours, panting and sweating, jabbing the pen in the ink now and then, until he had it all down.”

Scripps ink, from big bottles.

I had said in the book that Garrett sometimes hid in his “cave” from kids, and Connie, who turned 9 in Garrett’s last year, recalls:

“Although we did often go over to Garet and Dorothy's house, and I did catch my first fish off their dock, and Garet helped me unhook it, on the whole not too much happened of a family gathering nature when we were over there. We kids generally weren't allowed in his little building where he did his writing, but sometimes we were sent out there to fetch him or take him a snack, and I would look around in awe at all the books and papers around him.”

Trudy and Marshall remember Garrett showing them his artesian well, and how he had piped the water into his house. Garrett did his own plumbing.

In Unsanctioned Voice, I quote Cornuelle saying that Garrett had buckets of silver dollars under his porch as insurance against a feared inflation. (If he had lived another 20 years, they would have paid off.) Trudy and Marshall remember the stories of buried coins, either silver or gold. Marshall recalls that silver coins were found inside the ship’s binnacle, under a layer of sand.

When Garrett died, his property went to Dorothy. She died six months or so later, willing the property to her son, James. That was a setback for Marie and Joe, because they had to move out of the captain’s house into town.

Perhaps Garrett had an influence on the family. Connie was the closest to Garrett in her career: she became a writer and editor of Smithsonian magazine. Marshall is the closest to Garrett in his philosophy.

“I don’t think anybody knew about libertarianism then, if they called it that,” he says. “Most of us are still quite conservative, maybe not to the extent of libertarianism, but pretty near.”

“When I read about the attitudes of Garet Garrett, I see my brother,” Trudy says.

Trudy was an attorney, teaching classes in how non-attorneys could file papers and defend their rights. She recalls once going out with a man who admired Ayn Rand, and telling him, “I am the grandniece of Garet Garrett.”

About this Author

Bruce Ramsey is a Seattle writer and author of Unsanctioned Voice: Garet Garrett, Journalist of the Old Right.